Millennials Are Cynical Do-Gooders

It’s tempting to caricature Millennial workers as bright-eyed idealists, given their loudly stated preference for having a social impact through their careers. Either that or as narcissists only out for themselves. But neither is quite true, according to a new paper from The Brookings Institution. It’s easy to cherry-pick from the data to verify a stereotype about Millennials one way or the other, but the holistic picture painted by the paper is more subtle.

The generation born in the 80’s and 90’s does have an earnest belief that companies should care about the environment and other social issues, but they’re also the least trusting generation on record. And those two impulses aren’t contradictory.

Millennials score lower than any other generation in terms of believing that people can be trusted, and that that cynicism rose in the years following the Great Recession.

Millennials remain scarred by the financial crisis and ongoing tepid recovery (for instance, they keep more than half their savings in cash — much more than older generations do). The Brookings paper, a roundup of existing research on millennials, quotes a UBS report calling them “the most [financially] conservative generation since the Great Depression.”

The tension between Millennials’ hope and their cynicism often gets expressed as pragmatism. They aren’t particularly ideological, but they are attuned to global instability and injustice, economic and otherwise. As the authors put it, “The desire of Millennials for pragmatic action that brings results will overtake today’s emphasis on ideology and polarization as Boomers finally fade from the scene.” Millennials ditched their parents’ ideology but kept their insistence on a better world.

That means prioritizing social goals at work, of course — the paper cites a 2012 survey noting that two thirds of millennial workers said they want their employer to contribute to social or ethical causes. But they want to change the system from within: the organizations Millennials most want to work for include tech giants like Google, Apple, and Facebook, or the government — hard to get more establishment than that. When they are attracted to social impact organizations, they’re those that are designed to be short-term commitments, like Teach for America or the Peace Corps.

In addition, a USC study of Millennials working at PwC noted their demand that companies “make good use of worker’s time, be transparent with them, and provide a supportive work community.”

As this list of demands for corporations starts to expand beyond the environment and social ills to include transparency, engagement, and work-life balance, older generations might be again tempted to write Millennials off as naive. But perhaps younger workers are just expanding the role of the corporation beyond the interests of shareholders.

The Brookings paper cites research from Pew, noting that “about two-thirds of the Millennials surveyed in 2012 also agreed that ‘businesses make too much profit,’ which was the highest level of agreement among all generations.” That’s the thread that ties Millennials’ disparate demands together, even if most of them wouldn’t express them with reference to fiduciary duty.

Today’s younger workers aren’t seeking a revolution. They’re too practical for that. Instead, they’re taking jobs in corporate America and, in the process, insisting that average companies clean up their act. For decades, Wall Street has driven corporations to prioritize shareholder value above employees, the environment, social issues, and sometimes even customers. Now a wary, pragmatic generation is asking for those priorities to change.